joe

JOE (Joe's own editor) has the feel of most IBM PC text editors: The key-sequences are reminiscent of WordStar and Turbo-C. JOE is much more powerful than those editors, however. JOE has all of the features a UNIX user should expect: full use of termcap/terminfo, excellent screen update optimizations, simple installation, and all of the UNIX-integration features of VI.

Recent releases

Release Notes: Menus are now made up of macros instead of
options. ^T is now a user definable menu system.
Several syntax highlighting improvements were
made. Paragraph reformatting was improved. A
reload command to reload the edited file from disk
was added. Several other fixes and improvements
were made.

Release Notes: This release includes fixes for some core dump
bugs and also a few feature enhancements. The bugs
include core dumps when traversing menus and when
using the multi-file search and replace command.
Also fixed is a bug where the compile command (ESC
c) and the exit command in jmacs (^XC) would
sometime core dump. Enhancements include some
internationalization improvements, syntax
highlighters for M4 and joerc files, and the
ability to edit sections of files larger than 4GB.
This, in combination with the hex-dump display
mode, allow JOE to be used as a disk editor for
large hard drives.

Release Notes: This is a fairly major release that includes many bugfixes and feature enhancements. New features include: multi-file search and replace, reformatting of bullet lists, gettext() support, restoring the previous cursor position, better make and grep windows, subroutines in the syntax definition files (allows reuse of HTML for PHP and Mason), and new syntax files for Troff, Haskell, Cadance SKILL, REXX, LUA, and Ruby.

Release Notes: The default background color can now be set. 256 color xterms are now supported. The mouse can now resize windows and select menu entries. During selection with the mouse, the window will auto-scroll when you go past the edge. An xterm-patch tgat makes "-mouse" mode work better was included. Syntax files were provided for ADA, AWK, COBOL, SED, Postscript, and SQL. jpico was improved, and search now looks more like real pico. Grep finds can be performed using ESC g, followed by ESC space to jump to the indicated file and line. Cygwin setup.exe support was added.

I have been using joe ever since I discovered it within the Slackware Linux (http://www.slackware.com/) distro, and among the various editors I have tried (vim, elvis, pico) I think joe strikes the best balance between ease of use, interface, and functionality.

Particularly, it's my editor of choice for software development. The syntax highlighting is also very nice! I'm planning on writing an intro guide to UNIX/Linux software development to help our university students, and I plan on featuring joe rather prominently with screen shots in a tutorial-esque fashion. I'll post a link here when it's done.